What do you think?
Rate this book
The Drucker Proxy
Coleman Todd Drucker is a self-centered, self-made billionaire who lives on the a life of leveraged buyouts and bold business bets, of customized sports cars, sybaritic weekends, and sex on the side. As any smart player would, Drucker hedges his bets, in his case with a very special insurance policy. Drucker’s drive is more than matched by the intelligence and ambition of the women in his life, including his beautiful second wife, Barbra Ann Wilson, and the quirky journalist, Dana Carmody, who starts out to learn more about his insurance policy but soon finds herself in deep and dangerous waters. THE DRUCKER PROXY is a fast-paced and intelligent thriller, enriched by complex characters and spot-on social insights raising incisive questions about our times and the near future.
308 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2019
1 person is currently reading
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 18, 2019
THE DRUCKER PROXY is a genre-defying novel – thriller (techno- and legal) and social commentary, wrapped tightly in the sort of utterly believable near-future science fiction that Lior Samson does perfectly.
In one sense, as an admittedly technology-challenged reader, I'm hardly the best reviewer for this book. I had to take the accuracy of the tech and legal terminology, and the plausibility of the extrapolation of developments in artificial intelligence and related sciences over the next twenty years, on faith. But having read the author's related work – most recently The Intaglio Imprint – I was prepared to do that. Lior Samson's writing and plotting are never careless. And by the time I realized that following this novel's intricate premise and plot was going to require my very close attention (including some reliance on my Kindle's definition function – who knew it could link me to Wikipedia articles?), I was so gripped by the story that I couldn't stop reading.
Moreover, as I read, finding the book's science projected convincingly into the year 2039, I found another, subtler, kind of projection in play. From the central figure, Drucker himself, his first and second wives, his 12-going-on-25-year-old daughter, to the freelance journalist Dana who is the most important character in the book, there's an odd shallowness of affect combined with a strange fluidity of identity. These people live with and interact with "persons" who pretend to be human (think "Alexa" squared) and, as the AI's have become almost human, the humans seem to have become… very close to artificial. This is not accidental, I think. The Drucker Proxy, like all the best science fiction (starting, I'd suggest, with that famous book by Mary Shelley, which kept coming into my mind as I read this one), is a story about the interface between human beings and their creations. It deserves close and thoughtful reading.
In one sense, as an admittedly technology-challenged reader, I'm hardly the best reviewer for this book. I had to take the accuracy of the tech and legal terminology, and the plausibility of the extrapolation of developments in artificial intelligence and related sciences over the next twenty years, on faith. But having read the author's related work – most recently The Intaglio Imprint – I was prepared to do that. Lior Samson's writing and plotting are never careless. And by the time I realized that following this novel's intricate premise and plot was going to require my very close attention (including some reliance on my Kindle's definition function – who knew it could link me to Wikipedia articles?), I was so gripped by the story that I couldn't stop reading.
Moreover, as I read, finding the book's science projected convincingly into the year 2039, I found another, subtler, kind of projection in play. From the central figure, Drucker himself, his first and second wives, his 12-going-on-25-year-old daughter, to the freelance journalist Dana who is the most important character in the book, there's an odd shallowness of affect combined with a strange fluidity of identity. These people live with and interact with "persons" who pretend to be human (think "Alexa" squared) and, as the AI's have become almost human, the humans seem to have become… very close to artificial. This is not accidental, I think. The Drucker Proxy, like all the best science fiction (starting, I'd suggest, with that famous book by Mary Shelley, which kept coming into my mind as I read this one), is a story about the interface between human beings and their creations. It deserves close and thoughtful reading.
Displaying 1 of 1 review